Manohla Dargis

The cash, the clichés — it’s hard not to be impatient with a movie as openly lazy as Cold Comes the Night, which is redeemed only by its performances.

Sporadically funny, casually sexist, blithely racist and about as visually sophisticated as a parking-garage surveillance video.

Even when they don't always add up, these are movies in which De Niro can shrug off the burden of being Robert De Niro. Where the star who was Travis Bickle can again freely assume the part of the great character actor -- if only this time to ask, "You laughin' at me?"

Now that's exploitation.

To borrow and slightly emend the words of Shakespeare: That cat will mew, but this dog will have the day.

Finally, a serial-killer movie so preposterous, so garnished with accidental laugh lines and absent essential narrative logic it may actually put a permanent kibosh on this tediously overworked crime subgenre. Here's hoping, at any rate.

What’s striking about John McKay's feature debut is how much contempt toward his female characters the writer-director manages to pack into 115 minutes.

The upshot is that instead of a film about a love that conquered a king and nearly undid a kingdom, Madonna has come up with a female friendship movie, which would be fine if she weren't busy trying to prove her art-film bona fides.

Flat acting, risible dialogue, a witless story — sometimes when a movie hits this trifecta so completely, it engenders a feeling of disreputable pleasure. It’s bad, and you know it, and maybe the filmmakers know it too.

It isn't that nothing happens in Poolhall Junkies, it's that nothing interesting does.

Icky, nasty, calculatingly odd and a little funny, though more often strained and inadvertently absurd, After.Life changes its mood and apparent intentions from scene to scene, sometimes minute to minute.

Like all good B-movies, Returner comes loaded with enough eccentric touches to give the recycling a whiff of freshness and, as is often the case with many above-par follies, it's the cast that takes the whole thing to another level.

With The Canyons, [Mr. Schrader] tries to get at something real under all the hard, glossy surfaces, but ends up caught in the divide between the movie that he seems to have wanted to make and the one he did.

A nearly affectless Christian Slater, who carries a co-producing credit and seems to have lost his charisma along with his sneer, plays Tom, an armored-car guard who plays hide-and-seek with a gang of thieves, all of whom, outside of ringleader Jim (Morgan Freeman), are instantly forgettable.

Thin as a halfpenny, Victor Frankenstein has nothing to offer on science and the mysteries of creation, but it does reaffirm the grip that Shelley’s story retains on the imagination, no matter how far afield it’s taken.

Scottish director Michael Caton-Jones continues to fritter away the last traces of his talent with this ugly variant on Fred Zinnemann's 1973 original, The Day of the Jackal.

It could be worse, and would be without Bette Midler or Marisa Tomei.

A clutter of recycled cop-movie and serial-killer film clichés.

With so little trust and even less dialogue to back him up, it's no wonder Li rarely takes his left hand out of his pants pocket. His fists aren't furious; they're on strike.

Mr. Momoa has some awfully big biceps to fill. He rises to that task with a pumped physique made for ogling. Thankfully, he also shows glints of self-awareness that can make hypermasculine blowouts like these more watchable and were largely missing from Mr. Schwarzenegger's wide-eyed turn in the first "Conan the Barbarian" (1982).

One of the more watchable films of the summer. A folly, true, but watchable.

The actors don’t just look uncomfortable in their period duds, they also look uneasy in their own skins, which is a feat for two such natural, physically confident screen performers.

It’s a dispiriting mess and waste of talent, sunk by a lack of focus, misguided choices and insistently unproductive, at times incoherent clashing tones.

A grubby, lethally dull bid to cash in on the new extreme horror, the film turns on a conceit as frayed as Freddy Krueger’s shtick.

The only remotely notable thing about this particular jumble of boos, bangs and door creaks...is that it tries to wed the horror trend with the heated-up God market.

The Farrellys are still not much interested in film as a visual medium, and when Lloyd and Harry aren’t smacking each other or dropping their pants, you might as well be listening to a radio play. There’s a story, but it doesn’t matter, certainly not to the leads or the good-natured sidekicks like Kathleen Turner and Rob Riggle.

Because its director, Tom Vaughan, brings nothing of interest to the movie, including filmmaking, there isn't anything to say other than to note its insulting ugliness and ineptitude.

A promotional gimmick that's being slipped into theaters with the sort of stealth accorded only the unprofitable or the unwatchable.

The crushingly unfunny and slopped-together How to Lose Friends & Alienate People has neither the ambition nor the intelligence to do justice to its source material.

What's interesting about Stealth isn't its nitwit story... No, what's interesting about this movie - and many others of its kind - is that it continues the love affair Hollywood, that hotbed of liberalism, has long had with militarism.

Graced with a shimmering visual style and sense of lyrical self-consciousness that owes a debt to French visionary Jean Cocteau, the modest film provides further evidence of Mexico's recent cinematic renaissance.

The incrementally served up pieces never satisfactorily cohere. The blades fly as do the heads, but the movie remains disappointingly aground.

A barely coherent genre mishmash.

The man (Bay) just wears you out and wears you down, so much so that it’s easy to pretend that you’re not ingesting 2 hours and 30 minutes of warmongering along with all that dumb fun.

That Mr. De Niro and especially Miss Fanning manage to register through all this murk is a testament to their talent, which however squandered does nonetheless shine.

Dopey, derivative and dull, The Host is a brazen combination of unoriginal science-fiction themes, young-adult pandering and bottom-line calculation. That sounds like it should work (really!), but it never does, largely because the story is as drained of energy as are its moony aliens.

The worst thing about Event Horizon--written by Philip Eisner, directed by Paul Anderson--isn't all the gore decorating the 21st-century space ship that gives the movie its name, but the filmmakers' reliance on shock edits and headache-inducing sound F/X to obscure the fact that this is one of the most derivative movies to hit screens in memory.

An offense against feminism, narrative logic and Fleetwood Mac, The Kitchen is a terrible, witless mess.

As is the case with other unsatisfactory diversions, it is entirely possible to ignore the worst parts of this movie, to drift along during the lulls, slide over the half-baked jokes and just wait for Ms. McCarthy and Mr. Bateman to do their things.

Morbius is a ghoulish, suitably downbeat tale of madness, hubris, suffering and weird science set in a world that offers little solace. And while most of it is as predictably familiar as expected, it does something unusual for a movie like this: It entertains you, rather than bludgeons you into submission.

There are a couple of movies, or rather a couple of story ideas, tucked in Loosies, an amorphous, laugh-flecked drama about a New York City pickpocket that mostly comes across as a feature-length advertisement for its likable star and writer, Peter Facinelli.

Hitman exploits every action-flick cliché imaginable and still manages to be dull. It’s bang, boom, blah -- action movies for bored dummies.

The results are, by turns, amusing and lightly scary, though never truly surprising.

Mr. Lichtenstein seems to want your tears. Nothing wrong there. The problem is that, because he never settles persuasively into one groove -- you don’t believe the tears or the smiles or anything in between -- he can’t begin to approach the complex contradictions suggested by his movie’s title.

While the length and ridiculous finale are a drag, the only thing that stinks about Sphere is its pervasive boys-club snarkiness, especially since Stone is actually good. Levinson has always been a better director of men, but it would be nice if Attanasio could learn how to write a role for a woman that wasn't an embarrassment as well as an insult.

Anchored by Ms. Watts’s sympathetic performance, it humanizes the woman behind the smile, the helmet hair and the myth.

Ludicrous but not quite the howler it could and should have been.

Otherwise fine actors such as Don Cheadle and Gary Sinise spend nearly two hours of film time stand-ing around like department-store dummies mouthing dialogue so wooden it's petrified.

The film's screenwriters conjured up a very clever gimmick when they decided to revamp a favorite 60's television show. Too bad they forgot that a gimmick is no substitute for a screenplay, never mind a real movie.

A not very good and yet painless waste of time.

A junky-looking romantic comedy that’s neither remotely romantic nor passably comic.

Sandra Bullock looks as if she would rather be shoveling pig waste - though of course in some respects that is exactly what she's doing.

A divertingly goofy thriller with an animistic bent, moments of shivery and twitchy suspense and a solid lead performance from Mark Wahlberg.

About the only thing holding it together is Idris Elba, whose irrepressible magnetism and man-of-stone solidity anchors this mess but can’t redeem it.

Isn't just rotten -- badly acted, badly written, badly conceived -- it's dead inside.

A thoroughly, sometimes gaggingly broad and sly conceptual laugh-in.

Mr. Lee gathers together a lifetime of hurt without conveying that there's something personal at stake.

Trying to parse meaning in "Mia" is secondary to its main point, which is its look, created with 500,000 hand-drawn frames. That's impressive in an age in which most mainstream animation is done with computers.

A witless, thrill-free hodgepodge of shinily packaged action-thriller clichés.

A dud.

If Spawn had anything close to a script, it would be a pretty nifty fantasy about conspiracy, apocalypse and a fat killer clown.

This might not be the Titanic of romantic comedies (it’s tugboat size), but it’s a disaster: cynically made, barely directed, terribly written. But quick: there’s still time to escape!

No question, the film's best special effect is Ms. Garner, especially when she's in costume.

Though it has bad word of mouth, Jonah Hex is generally better, sprier and more diverting than most of the action flicks now playing, "The A-Team" included.

An accidental entertainment, Equilibrium is a science-fiction pastiche so lacking in originality that if you stripped away its inspirations there would be precious little left.

Mr. Hopkins doesn’t have much to do, but it can be amusing to see him upstage everyone else with sonorous murmurings and imperious demands for a robe and Chinese takeout.

By literalizing the idea of American military aggression and all that it implies Ms. Nair doesn’t just invest Mr. Hamid’s story with Hollywood-style beats, she also completely drains it of ambiguity.

Serviceable trash. It looks and moves like a low-end action movie, complete with thumping soundtrack, nanosecond-fast edits, stunts that probably look scary to anyone who doesn't know better and even a third-act police chase through downtown L.A. In other words, it's Bruckheimer for babies.

Mr. Kwanten, meanwhile, best known for playing the sweet, dim Jason Stackhouse on the HBO show "True Blood," gives Griff the delicate, ethereal affect of a man who's an alien in his own world except when he's running down an alley in a disguise. He's a pleasure to watch.

Low-key creepy rather than outright scary, the new Amityville marks a modest improvement over the original, partly because, from acting to bloody effects, it is better executed.

A professional with real credits, so I assume that [Mr. Foley's] not finally responsible for the ineptitude of Fifty Shades Darker, which ranges from continuity issues to unsurprisingly risible writing. There are also abrupt swings in tone, dead-end detours and flatline performances, including from Ms. Johnson.

A relentlessly ugly, unpleasant, often incoherent assault on the senses from Brazil.

For the most part it is an uninteresting slog alleviated only by the occasional unintended laugh and moments of visual beauty. Mr. Shyamalan generally torpedoes his movies with overweening self-seriousness.

Pitched as a black comedy, the film thus far seems to have divided audiences between those who think it unaccountably hilarious and those who see it as the latest manifestation of what might be called the new nihilism.

If it's difficult to pinpoint exactly where this maladroit drama about the infamous New York discotheque went wrong, it's because everything in the film is lousy: The writing, the directing, the acting, the casting (Neve Campbell?), the moral posturing, the Capote clone, the Andy lookalike, even the glitter that clings to Salma Hayek's lashes like tears.

Actors make lousy choices all the time and if Like a Boss makes money no one will care that it’s formulaic, unfunny, choppy, insults women and seems to be missing much of its middle.

So badly written, so poorly directed and performed, and so garishly visualized -- attention Kmart shoppers! -- it defies explanation.

A cringing romance that Mr. Vinterberg tries and fails to spin into a political allegory.

Throws us directly into the ring for one of the most brutal fight scenes in American film.

The lackluster, at times abysmal writing wouldn’t much matter if Resurgence popped visually or featured a charismatic star who could lift a movie as effortlessly as Will Smith did in the first feature.

This pricey, juiceless pulp could never have been killed by critics, simply because it was already dead.

One of the good things about bad movies is that when someone sneers about the unworthiness of a perfectly mediocre film like, say, "Crash," you can turn to a seriously unworthy film like, say, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause and laugh. Ho. Ho. Ho.

Probably the best way to experience Warcraft, a generally amusing and sometimes visually arresting absurdity, is stoned. If watching the big screen through a cannabis cloud isn’t your idea of a good movie time, though, I suggest that you do what I did and just go with the incoherent flow.

Generally, Hooper pulls away from loony-tunes excess, tries for sexy rather than freaky, and plucks at heartstrings, a reflex that pulls the story into mawkishness, particularly when he cuts to Victoria.

The only marginally interesting, if unsurprising, thing about the pricey movie spinoff of the junky children's television show Land of the Lost is that a lot of money has been spent on yet another cultural throwaway.

The cinema of morons made by morons for morons, Swordfish is everything you expect but worse.

Mr. Moodysson may believe that he can stick it to the audience politically by sticking it to his characters. But like most film directors who commit to this strategy, his tactics come across as both naïve and wildly self-indulgent, while his fascination with the spectacle of the corrupt and the cruel is simply tedious.

Showtime is better than the fourth "Lethal Weapon," which was pretty bad, but not as good as the original "Lethal Weapon" or the superior "48HRS."

A kind of dumb but also kind of smart-about-being-dumb comedy.

It seems doubtful that Surveillance, a would-be transgression that tries to squeeze dark laughs from the spectacle of human suffering, would be taking up space in theaters if its director were not the daughter of a name filmmaker.

May be better enjoyed in an herb-enhanced condition. Getting stoned is, after all, a running joke in this comedy, which is as thin as rolling paper and just as ephemeral.

Perfectly acceptable watched on the back of an airline seat or at home while you're doing housework.

As a film, it essentially bites.

The television commercials for the movie say something about this being the same team that brought you “Face/Off,” which is about as relevant to this picture as noting that Paul Thomas Anderson got Wahlberg to drop his pants in “Boogie Nights.”

In his debut the director, Dan Bradley, a stunt coordinator with a long list of credits, handles the low-fi action well, which helps divert attention from the bargain-bin special effects, bad acting and politics.

Plays more like a nightmare than a dream, and an exceedingly unnerving one at that. Sam isn't just a prisoner of her parents' ambitions; like nearly everyone else in this film, she's a zombie, sleepwalking through life while Rome burns.

A would-be erotic thriller with no heat and zero chills, Deception has the kind of glassy, glossy sheen and risible story that mean to suggest "Basic Instinct" but instead invoke lesser laughers like "Jade" and "Sliver."

A weepie, a thriller, a tragedy, a sub-Spielbergian pastiche, The Book of Henry is mostly a tedious mess.

What is surprising is that while the patchwork whole creaks terribly in places, the parts also show signs of life.

Frankly, the film's real surprise is that it doesn't collapse under the weight of its sanctimonious posturing and howling pretension. The film is crammed with high-cultural references and people playing "smart," but none of it adds up.

If nothing else, it’s amusing to imagine what [Mr. Bridges] and Ms. Moore chatted about between takes and how each managed to keep from cracking up, more or less.

A grim, dispiritingly stupid waste of time, energy, money and talent.

Sluggishly paced and shot in the sort of grubby digital video that renders even the dewiest skin tone liverwurst gray, the film comes across as little more than a series of acting workshop exercises wrapped in a tissue of cliché.

These guys have dumbed down a comic book.

It’s of course unfair to blame Quentin Tarantino for all the terrible movies he has inspired, but enough already!

Slick, noisy thriller.

A film worthy neither of Mr. Keaton's talents nor even a desperate horror fan's attention.

The risible dialogue, the bulging eyeballs, the heaving bosoms, the digitally rendered hyenas and squirming maggots, the movie fails to achieve the status of the instant camp classic. That's partly because the vibe of the film is too torpid.

The film teeters so perilously and routinely at the edge of camp, both with some of its casting choices and some unfortunate dialogue (the repeated warning that "Jumby wants to be born now"), that it's hard to know if Mr. Goyer wants to make us howl with fear or laughter.

As the requisite love interest, Amy Smart gives the film's only professional performance, while co-star Eric Stoltz, as the story's villain, walks somnolent through the scenery with what seems to be barely suppressed mirth. Given the deeply unpleasant plot machinations and amateurish direction, the actor's amusement is understandable.

Directed by Shana Feste (“Country Strong”), this new Endless Love doesn’t have enough going on to make it memorably terrible: Banality is its gravest sin.

Absurd beyond belief or reason.

The Condemned is uncanny only in its resemblance to a television soap, with acting as flat as the lighting and scenes that end with the kind of cliffhanger moments that otherwise announce commercial breaks.

Donner's most calamitous mistake, however, was forgetting to light the screenplay on fire and catapult it from the nearest trebuchet.

This predictable teenage take on the 'Fatal Attraction' formula goes from dumb to even dumber.

The director, Marcus Nispel, takes his butchery very seriously. (He was the lead vivisectionist for the remake of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.") He may not be able to make this movie move, but, man, can he make an eyeball fly.

Neither ambitious enough to take seriously nor sleazy enough to enjoy, The Quiet flirts with the trappings of exploitation cinema without going all the way.

My, what sharp teeth Ms. Hardwicke doesn't have: working from David Leslie Johnson's screenplay she takes on the story's grown-up themes of sex and death directly but weakly.

Clichéd, enervating, insulting — it’s tough to settle on a single pejorative for Rock the Kasbah, though abysmal might do.

But since Costner canít save his movie, it's something of a stretch to think he might be able to save the world.

Anatomy of Hell is more than a lapse; it is a brutal self-parody of a filmmaker who, having stripped down to the nitty-gritty once too often, may finally have nothing left to show.

See evil. See evil run. Run, evil, run all the way to cable television purgatory.

An aggressively noisy exercise in style over substance about nasty people doing nasty things to one another in (sigh) Southern California.

Too bad that the best that can be said about the woeful movie version of the The Aspern Papers, based on the Henry James novella, is that it might send you running to the original.

The film means to be a darkly funny look at the perils of winning at all costs, but there's nothing dark and searching about its take.

A cynical, clumsy, aptly titled attempt to cross the female-oriented romantic comedy with the male-oriented gross-out comedy that is interesting on several levels, none having to do with cinema.

Timing, good jokes and characters you can laugh with and at are mostly missing from Gentlemen Broncos.

Although rumor and marketing indicate that this is meant to be a comedy, there's little that's funny here.

A family circus of dysfunction that's so familiar you may feel tempted to place bets on how everything will shake out.

Its cast aside, Last Knights proves as square and blandly manly as an old “Prince Valiant” comic strip. Mr. Owen’s hairdo and the faint smile edging his lips are more fetching than anything about Val, and the movie’s violence is more explicit than in most vintage comics, but “Knights” also works by combining narrative simplicity with moral certitude and appealing graphics.

Bill Murray completists, tots under 5 and their unfortunate chaperons are the only ones who need experience the soulless excuse for an entertainment called Garfield: The Movie.

May just be the most boring movie ever made; certainly it's the most boring movie I've suffered through to the bitter end.

The three leads go through the motions with goofy geniality, and director Chris Koch has enlisted some consummate character actors -- to help hold up the sagging jokes and story line.

Viewer discretion is advised, if only because it's well-nigh unwatchable.

Worth commenting on only for its shocking ineptitude.

A dreary indulgence. An unfunny satire set in the world of daytime soap opera, it isn't offensive enough to inspire passionate response.

Apparently, because all the good jokes were used up in the first two "Fockers" movies, the wisenheimers behind the latest installment in this unnecessary trilogy decided to bring in some spew, opening a sick toddler's mouth like a fire hydrant and letting it rip.

Twisted is rubbish, but it looks good enough, moves fast enough and does improve as it progresses, principally because its plot disintegrtes to the point of outright comedy.

The charm of this fantasy has always been dubious and will presumably fade as the natural world continues to disappear and more and more species become extinct.

The only real bummer about Madame Web, the latest installment in the Spider-Man chronicles, isn’t that it’s bad, but that it never achieves memorably terrible status. The story is absurd, the dialogue snort-out-loud risible, the fights uninspired. Even so, there are glimmers of wit and competency. And then there’s its star, Dakota Johnson, who has a fascinating, seemingly natural ability to appear wholly detached from the nonsense swirling around her.

Although it's not half bad -- which doesn't mean it's half good -- this horror cheapie comes equipped with a few ideas, a little atmosphere and a couple of serviceable scares.

A disaster of the highest or perhaps lowest order.

The producers are going to have to hire a better director if they want moviegoers to be curious enough about this Galt guy to buy a ticket for the presumptive third and final chapter.

Not that Madonna has gone in for originality, which isn't really her thing: rather, instead of repurposing a genre, she has riffled through the art-house catalog for inspiration, as evidenced by the film's intentionally grubby visual texture, jumpy editing, direct-address commentary, freeze frames and other tricks.

The pits.

The Benchwarmers is the sort of trash that Hollywood does really well. It is also, to quote Mr. Schneider, "a master's thesis on the form of a quintessential Adam Sandler comedy."

The only vaguely funny moments are courtesy William Fichtner, as the dead woman's husband, and Jamie Lee Curtis in full metal drag as his furtive squeeze.

What’s missing is what’s often absent in industrial moviemaking of this type: story and characters, yes, but also the human touch and a sense that someone behind the scenes actually cares about the work.

If Gods of Egypt were any worse, it might be a masterpiece.

When it comes to real people living and loving in the real world, the studios don't have a clue.

The appealing Mr. Baker never manages to find the right tone for the material, partly because he’s been seriously miscast (he radiates too much decency and intelligence for the role), though more because Mr. Waters never establishes a coherent tone for either the character or his situation.

A dopey if largely painless romantic comedy.

A consistently underused and often underrated actor, Kinnear gives one of those sympathetic performances that prevent you from believing the worst about a movie despite the sounding alarms.

Many of the words that I would like to use to describe this waste of talent and time...can’t be lobbed in a family publication. So, instead, I will just start by throwing out some permissible insults: artificial, clichéd, mawkish, preposterous, incompetent, sexist, laughable, insulting.

A leaden, clotted, exasperating mess.

An execrable mess that leaves no genre cliché unturned or human body or soul untrammeled.

This delectable fusion of New Age babble and luridly bad filmmaking may not "open" you up, to borrow one of the film's favorite verbs, but it might leave your jaw slack and your belly sore from laughter.

Absent one original moment and bathed in de rigueur steel blue punctuated by sporadic bursts of flaming orange, the movie is notable only for its creative approach to Seagal's bulky gracelessness: Not since "Apocalypse Now" has a film gone to such lengths to hide what its star looks like.

This is harmless stuff, and sometimes it's actually pretty funny, too.

Even when Mr. Coogan can't make his scenes work, his prickly presence keeps you watching, as does the eerie scenes of winter that Mr. Glatzer captures with the camera.

The kind of witless production that should rightly be cluttering the discount bins at your local video store.

Cast adrift with vague, improbable characters and a plot that's at once under-and overcooked, the actors struggle to find a steady tone, lurching from somber to silly as the director tries to figure out what he's doing.

Critics are paid to suffer bad art, no matter how icky it is from the start. So all we could do was to Sit! Sit! Sit! Sit! And we did not like it. Not one little bit.

Falls wildly short of its inspirations.

A nasty exploitation flick tarted up with art-house actors and psychobabble.

There's no defense for movies like these, but neither do they warrant apology; they're irresistibly watchable, like car wrecks.

Given the tainted history of Supernova, it's difficult to figure out where to place blame for either the undernourished screenplay or the moribund action.

Unfunny comedy. Nearly everyone is terrible except for Cumming, who just does what comes naturally and steals his every scene.

Nearly as unwatchable as it is unpronounceable.

Madonna may be better in this film than she's been in some of her recent endeavors, especially when she stops screeching her lines, but she's done herself no favors with her choice of material.

Crushingly unfunny.

The scariest thing about The Devil Inside is that a major studio like Paramount Pictures, which is distributing it, may be able to squeeze more profit out of a tedious, tediously exhausted subgenre that was already creatively tapped out when "The Blair Witch Project" spooked audiences more than a decade ago.

Although it's often laugh-out-loud laughably bad, 88 Minutes is mostly just a slog.

The real-life sisters Hilary and Haylie Duff star in this incompetent spin on the poor-little-rich-girl story.

Dude, one last thing: If you see my moms and pops, definitely don't tell them about this.

The concept of an intelligent woman is apparently so exotic to Ms. Bullock and her director, Phil Traill, that they frantically kook the character up, as if female smarts were a kind of disability. This being a contemporary big-studio release, I suppose it is.

The story leapfrogs abruptly from scene to scene, and it makes such a mockery of narrative logic and continuity that the cast tends to look either baffled (Dorff) or as if they're trying to remain unrecognized.

Astonishing isn't the word -- neither is incompetent, incoherent or just plain crap. Indeed, none of these words really gets at the very special type of badness that is Deuces Wild.

A cringe-inducing romantic comedy turned cancer tragedy turned inspirational hosanna about living in the moment, embracing your bliss and other clichés.

It's shockingly inert.

Barely proficient on a craft level, this jumble of putatively comic misunderstanding and overly familiar crude burlesque achieves its nadir with a cameo from Mamie Van Doren, a degrading, shameful turn that lays bare, all too literally, the filmmakers' contempt for women.

Much like the dress that Mr. Pierre designed for her — a white number whose bold black zigzag obscures all of its seams — Mrs. Trump seems exceptionally good at keeping hidden how everything, her marriage and family included, fits together.

It is the sort of human-scale production that holds your attention with good acting, nice lighting and a screenplay that favors thought over action, thoughtful incident over full-blown episode.

It's never clear how Mr. Lacuesta, whose use of other art-cinema conventions (like nonprofessional performers) risks cliché, sees these parts working together or what he wants you to take from them. He's so committed to non-transparency as a principle that he locks you out.

The delightfully playful, playfully imaginative Grand Amour was directed by Pierre Etaix, a filmmaker, illustrator, musician and clown whose major work and poetic melancholia has long been denied to filmgoers.

Ms. Silver’s ability to translate the liminal into cinematic terms, to catch those moments between innocence and knowing, childhood and adulthood, unforgiving and forgiving, makes her someone to watch.

Insistently cinematic and dialectical, Red Hollywood has another virtue: It doesn’t toss everyone into a single leftist lump. Differences are articulated and illustrated, as individual voices rise and fall, fade and endure.

Mr. Brocka likes to go big and blunt, but in Insiang, he does his strongest work when he delivers his politics quietly.

It’s a must see for those interested in both the history of Lost New York and the power of nonfiction cinema.

This restoration of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey is an extraordinary act of cinematic reclamation and historiography.

The film’s silence works as a kind of invitation, encouraging you to infer meaning and jump to conclusions as one image gives way to the next.

The movie’s truth is presumably meant to rest in its emotions, in the spilled tears of its characters, but the only things at stake here are the cozy sniffles of the art-film patron.

No matter how distinct the elements — and how differently arranged — they are of a feverish, profoundly uneasy piece.

Etched with precision and conveying a world of feeling, The Power of Kangwon Province is the second feature by the South Korean director Hong Sang-soo and one of the best films you can see this year.

As the tone, vibe and storytelling parts shift and shift again — the movie is by turns a hospital drama, a marriage melodrama, a black-market intrigue — Meriem and especially Fares draw you near, push you away and prompt you to choose sides.

The problem of translation — who speaks for whom and why — echoes through Expedition Content, which builds to a shattering climax during a long, boozy revel in which the expedition men joke and laugh.

Even as Frank keeps questioning and exploring, Madeiras and the full sweep of his life remain as out of focus as this documentary, an essay without a coherent thesis.